


"Not as Lost, Violent Souls:" Alex Manes and T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"

by haloud



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Character Analysis, Essays, Gen, Not Fic, Poetry Analysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 20:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21203843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: A close reading and analysis of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" as it applies to Alex Manes, his overall character, and his decision to quote the poem in episode 1x09. Examines the poem both from the perspective of having metaphorical significance to the origins and arc of Alex as a character, with emphasis on his personal history, his struggle with his identity in both the past and the present, and how his relationships have shaped those ideas; and as a work existing in the world the characters inhabit, read and referenced by Alex specifically, and how knowledge of and relation to the work may have shaped those aforementioned elements of himself.





	"Not as Lost, Violent Souls:" Alex Manes and T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted in segments to my tumblr but published here as a cohesive essay.

* * *

** **

**Introduction**

T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” despite being somewhat under-represented in the scholarship of his body of work, is nevertheless considered to be one of the most often-quoted pieces of literature of the 20th century for the famous words that comprise the final stanza:

> This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends  
Not with a bang but a whimper.

When Alex quotes this poem in episode 1x09, he is carrying on a long tradition of quoting this poem, and an equally long tradition of ever-so-slightly bastardizing the lines for maximum effect. The seamless integration of this stanza into the cultural consciousness could, one could convincingly argue, render it an entity unto itself, divorced from its source material, which I have already pointed out is itself hardly a blockbuster example of Eliot’s work. However, “The Hollow Men,” its relation to Alex’s character, and the meaning in the way in which he quotes it have a greater significance to Alex’s overall identity.

There are two ways to examine the poem in this context: first, as having metaphorical significance to the origins and arc of Alex as a character, with emphasis on his personal history, his struggle with his identity in both the past and the present, and how his relationships have shaped those ideas; second, as a work existing in the world the characters inhabit, read and referenced by Alex specifically, and how knowledge of and relation to the work may have shaped those aforementioned elements of himself. I will be referring to these two perspectives as the “Doylist” and “Watsonian”[1] readings of the poem and its relation to Alex. As one view necessarily informs the other when working from a baseline understanding that “The Hollow Men” is of significant meaning, it’s equally necessary to present a synthesis of the ideas contained within the separate Doylist and Watsonian frameworks, thus creating a holistic image of the poem’s place in understanding Alex’s character as well as its place in _Roswell_ itself.

The Doylist analysis will take the form of a close reading of the poem, interpreting its language and symbolism in the context of Alex’s character, his established relationships, and the setting of _Roswell, New Mexico_. The Watsonian analysis will take the form of a less scholarly and more meta approach to examining at what time in his life Alex might have encountered the poem, how he as a person might interpret it, and why he would call upon it in the context he does.

**Epigraph: Connections**

Alex’s connection to “The Hollow Men” begins as early as the poem’s own epigraph–a pair of referential lines that open the poem. The first, a reference to Conrad’s _Heart of Darkness_, a story about imperialism, racism, and a man growing disgusted with the “civilized” world, which brings to mind Alex’s speech about war and atrocity from episode 1x12:

> Kyle: What if there’s some truth to it? That the aliens are killers […] What if the good ones are the exception to the rule?
> 
> Alex: You just watched your government blow up a building full of elderly people. Your brain is trying to justify the slaughter so that your government can be right. You want to believe that we’re safe. That goodness prevails. That’s the coldest reality about war. Sometimes you’re just doing what you’re told. Then, all of a sudden, things are burning, people are screaming…And then you look around, and you realize that the evil is you.

The second epigraph reads “A penny for the Old Guy,” a reference to Guy Fawkes and the custom of asking for pennies with which to buy fireworks in the days leading up to Bonfire Night. Drawing this parallel to Alex, I ask: who is he? Who is Guy Fawkes? Depending on who you ask and when, Fawkes could be either a Catholic dissenter who planned to blow up a government building and failed miserably, or he could be a revolutionary anti-government symbol. And who, in turn, is Alex? Is he a soldier following orders and fighting his father’s battles despite his own principles and desires? Or is he the “black sheep” of his family, doing what has to be done to survive and shoulder the burden of his legacy, working to make the world a better place? And will he succeed or fail, as Fawkes did?

**Part I: The self in effigy**

Getting into the poem proper, the first stanza reads as follows:

> We are the hollow men  
We are the stuffed men  
Leaning together  
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!  
Our dried voices, when  
We whisper together  
Are quiet and meaningless  
As wind in dry grass  
or rats’ feet over broken glass  
In our dry cellar.

The first image of the poem, the “stuffed men…headpiece filled with straw” is that of a scarecrow or effigy, continuing somewhat from the epigraph of Guy Fawkes. This dummy (meaning an inanimate, humanoid object) is a constructed being in a shape of a man, empty inside, created for a purpose outside its own, created to be used and discarded. The scarecrow’s only purpose is to sit alone in a field, subject to the slow decay of the elements; the effigy’s purpose is to be burned, often to make a statement against its subject. In a sense, Alex the soldier is a scarecrow set up by his father—set up for a purpose and left alone in the proverbial field to protect the farmer’s interests, aka his father’s legacy. And in another sense, Alex the soldier is an effigy of his younger self, burning to prove a point. Both the scarecrow and the effigy are powerless; as the poem says, “Our dried voices…are quiet and meaningless.” Eliot scholar Grover Smith says of the “figurative straw dummies” that they

> [D]esignate not only the ineptness and spiritual flaccidity of the speaker, but…his inability to attain love. If one turns back…to some of the most ancient as well as the most persistent rituals of pagan Europe, it is the straw men who seems to have functioned in certain of the fire festivals as a sacrificial representative of the vegetation spirit or as a scapegoat ridding his folk of accumulated ill-chance. (Smith)

And, then, connecting the straw dummy symbol once more to the epigraph, Smith says “the commemoration of the fifth of November itself reflects the custom of burning in effigy the bearer of local guilt, the accident of the season.” The idea of Alex as a scarecrow, essentially a puppet, calls back to his words in 1x13 that, ever since he enlisted, he has been fighting his father’s battles and barely recognizes himself anymore. The idea of Alex as an effigy—the “bearer of local guilt”—calls back to the idea that becoming a soldier would constitute a change of state for a young gay kid into a “real man.” Neither is a charitable or wholly accurate reading of Alex’s enlistment, but nor are they wholly _inaccurate_. Alex and his father, so closely enmeshed in his identity as an airman, have both at different times seen him as a puppet and as an effigy, as represented in the symbolism of the poem.

The poem continues with a couplet:

> Shape without form, shade without color  
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

These lines describe the state of the hollow men, only half of what they should be, held back and impotent. I don’t have much regarding Alex to say about these two lines—they are a convincingly powerful image within themselves—but they are a useful point of reference for later in the poem when these contradictory dichotomies come up again.

Next, we look at the final stanza of section I:

> Those who have crossed  
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom  
Remember us - if at all - not as lost  
Violent souls, but only  
As the hollow men  
The stuffed men.

Much has been made in scholarship of “The Hollow Men” of the image of the eyes and to what Eliot could be referring by “death’s other kingdom.” The eyes are, as stated in Eliot’s own letters, a reference to the eyes of Beatrice that persist throughout Dante’s Divine Comedy—the eyes of the main character’s lover. So here I mention Michael for the first time. If I am assigning Michael to the Beatrice role, here, it seems to set him apart from the hollow men themselves, though much of the imagery—the straw puppets, desert imagery to come later, and the general theme of hollowness in itself—of the hollow men would not be out of place applied to Michael. However, I choose to interpret the role of the eyes in the poem as well as the plea in this stanza as befitting Michael’s place in Alex’s life. Michael has crossed into an “other” kingdom, unattainable, separate. And Alex does not want to be remembered as lost or violent, because neither of those things would be the truth. It is not because he wants to exonerate himself nor because it is any more heroic, but he wants to be remembered as he truly is, as both a puppet manipulated by the force that manipulates them both—his father—and as the effigy made of himself, by himself and others, without his own permission. Both the passive and the active states of being. Again, I’ll call on his speech from 1x13, where he says, “I could tell you that I didn’t want to leave, but I did. After what my father did to you, I wanted to be the kind of person who won battles. It felt good.” There is violence there, inherent in being a soldier. There is also a sense of being lost; he was thrown into the military because he had no escape from it, so he made the choice to embrace it even though he wanted his life to go down a different path. However, in the 1x13 speech—made to Michael, or, in other words, in Michael’s eyes—he states his desire to move on from that place he got stuck ten years ago.

**Part II: Make it feel over**

The second part of “The Hollow Men” begins:

> Eyes I dare not meet in dreams  
In death’s dream kingdom

As always in poetry, and in Eliot specifically, there has been debate for almost a century about some of his wording. In particular, the different “kingdoms” he references throughout this poem are subject to much discussion. For the purposes of this analysis, I subscribe to the interpretation that “death’s dream kingdom” just refers to sleep. Taking the “eyes” as Michael’s presence in the poem, these lines read quite simply—Alex can’t bring himself to look at Michael, to look for him, to acknowledge him at all, even in dreams.

This entire section can be read as an entreaty to “the eyes”:

> There, the eyes are:  
Sunlight on a broken column  
There, is a tree swinging  
And voices are  
In the wind’s singing  
More distant and solemn  
Than a fading star.

The broken column, the swinging tree (implying an untethering from the generally solid nature of trees), the distant voices, the singing wind, the fading star—all these images bring to mind a sort of ruined glory. Something that once was great, grand, whole, or tangibly real is no longer. The feeling of finality conveyed here, both in the talk of death and in the words used themselves, makes this a particularly poignant point of reference for Alex to use when Michael asks him to “really make it feel over.”

The poem continues:

> Let me be no nearer  
In death’s dream kingdom  
Let me also wear  
Such deliberate disguises  
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves  
In a field  
Behaving as the wind behaves  
No nearer –

The scarecrow/straw dummy imagery returns in this section; this time, however, the dummy has slightly more agency, though it is not using that agency to do anything of significance. It “wears…deliberate” clothing and “behaves” like the wind does. Of this section of the poem, Smith says, “here [the eyes] are the upbraiding eyes of one incarnating his lost redemption: the speaker takes refuge in apathy; he desires to think of himself only as a scarecrow. He shrinks from everything but concealment among the other hollow men.” Alex uses the identity impressed upon him as something of a shield—his own “deliberate disguise”—and, similarly, he uses distance as a shield as well. The wind is changing, forceful, uncatchable, untouchable, invisible—all things Alex might wish to be, all qualities that might protect him.

Finally, this section ends:

> Not that final meeting  
In the twilight kingdom

Fading, death, final twilight—so many words in the second segment of the poem describe something coming to an end, inevitably and inexorably. Even before the final lines of the poem, the reader is being primed to accept that sometimes things end “with a whimper.” They die slowly, like how day fades into night. They simply fade away, with no celebration or fanfare. These lines also include a reference to yet another “kingdom;” in this case, many people consider the twilight kingdom simply to be death itself. The speaker does not want to be closer to the eyes, whether out of fear, despair, or apathy: not now, and not even in death. Again, this section really _makes it feel over._

The epigraph and the first two segments of “The Hollow Men” portray the speaker as a man who has lost a sense of identity or purpose, both among the hollow men and wishing to be more like them, haunted by a vision of “eyes” and wishing to live more completely in the meaningless, liminal space inhabited by the hollow men. If Alex is the speaker, trapped in a sense in the world that makes “hollowness” the only state of being achievable, then the desire to inhabit that distant, liminal space is representative of the defense mechanisms he has developed to navigate the world. He takes control, avoiding vulnerability. He runs away, keeping intimate interactions with the person who makes him most vulnerable on his terms. In sections III-V, the imagery of the eyes grows ever stronger, as the world of the speaker grows more dismal and disconnected, concluding with the breakdown of connections inherent in the Shadow falling between such deeply connected things, and the final statement about the end of the world.

**Part III: Lone and level sands**

This segment of the poem is one of the shortest, and it shifts the focus from the hollow men themselves, the speaker, and the eyes, and onto the broader landscape the hollow men occupy.

> This is the dead land  
This is cactus land

Of course, we, the writers of Roswell, and the characters of the show would all know that deserts are not “dead” at all. However, pairing “dead land” with “cactus land” in the segment immediately following the previous lines about the kingdoms of death is meant to communicate a sense of the total bleakness of the landscape, as well as serve as a reminder of the futility of the existence of the hollow men, who are compared to scarecrows, but in this “cactus land” have no real fields to stand in and therefore have no real function.

> Here the stone images  
Are raised, here they receive  
The supplication of a dead man’s hand  
Under the twinkle of a fading star

In Jeffrey Howard’s explication of this poem[2], he identifies these lines and this imagery as being in reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” It’s certainly an interesting connection in the context of some things already established regarding Alex and Jesse. Jesse is very much a “look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”[3] person. As Howard goes on to say, Shelley’s poem “appears as a cold sarcasm regarding humanity’s aspirations to godhood instead of being an earnest evaluation of humanity’s might, which does not, in reality, exist” (10). This entire discussion brings to my mind again Alex’s speech to Kyle in 1x12, how there exists a constant need to justify atrocities committed by one’s government (the modern American answer to atrocities committed by godhood), and how people generally fail to recognize that what seems like might is more often than not a completely empty concept.

> is it like this  
In death’s other kingdom  
Waking alone  
At the hour when we are  
Trembling with tenderness  
Lips that would kiss  
Form prayers to broken stone

Here, the speaker is asking if the world is just as bleak for those who have “crossed over,” as said in the first segment, to “death’s other kingdom.” In death’s other kingdom, do the people there have to wake alone, when they are “trembling with tenderness?” Do the people there have the freedom to kiss, when all the speaker/the hollow men can do is “form prayers to broken stone?”[4] Previously, the speaker has expressed an inability to come to “death’s other kingdom,” locked in a sort of purgatory with the other hollow men; the speaker has also expressed resistance to “death’s dream kingdom,” wanting to stay far away from the vision of eyes that that dream kingdom brings, knowing that he will always be far away from “that final meeting / In the twilight kingdom.” Here, however, the speaker expresses almost a yearning for things to be different, even if achieving “death’s other kingdom” is impossible.

**Part IV: Valley of dying stars**

Part IV opens with further bleak imagery and further admission of hopelessness:

> The eyes are not here  
There are no eyes here  
In this valley of dying stars  
In this hollow valley  
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

The speaker has succeeded, then, for a given value of success; he has avoided the gaze of the eyes, and now they are gone altogether. The stars are dying, the valley is hollow, even the tiny scraps of life that may have existed previously in this landscape are winking out, one by one. The line that stands out in this stanza is that about the “broken jaw” of the lost kingdom, which is a flare of violence or pain, whether by accident or deliberately induced, which stands out among all the numbness that characterizes the rest of the poem.

> In this last of meeting places  
We grope together  
And avoid speech  
Gathered on this beach of this tumid river[5]
> 
> Sightless, unless  
The eyes reappear  
As the perpetual star  
Multifoliate rose  
Of death’s twilight kingdom  
The hope only  
Of empty men.

The hollow men gather together against what separates them from what is, textually, death, but symbolically is more like salvation, paradise, or connection. This segment of the poem has strong religious imagery—too strong to overlook, despite a general tendency to avoidance of religious discussion thus far because it’s not terribly relevant to Alex’s character. That being said, the Watsonian analysis will go into further detail about what significance the religious imagery in “The Hollow Men” may have to Alex as a person, despite the lack of any religious context for his character in the show thus far. As a continuation of the Doylist analysis, I will say only that the eyes have once again appeared as a signifier of salvation or peace. “The hope only / of empty men.”

**Part V: The Shadow**

Here is how the fifth and final movement of the poem begins:

> Here we go round the prickly pear  
Prickly pear, prickly pear  
Here we go round the prickly pear  
At five o'clock in the morning.

Now, before I get fully into Part V, I just want to let you all know about the deeply, _deeply_ hilarious opinion of Smith[6] about the “prickly pear” parody of the “mulberry bush” children’s song, which is that the prickly pear is a _phallic symbol_ while the mulberry bush is _all vaginas all the time, apparently.**[7]**_ Grover. My buddy. My dude. What. Anyway, the remainder of the poem is a long set of dichotomies or intrinsically and existentially paired concepts, interspersed with a line from the Lord’s Prayer, concluding with the famous final lines.

> Between the idea  
And the reality  
Between the motion  
And the act  
Falls the Shadow
> 
> For Thine is the Kingdom
> 
> Between the conception  
And the creation  
Between the emotion  
And the response  
Falls the Shadow
> 
> Life is very long
> 
> Between the desire  
And the spasm  
Between the potency  
And the existence  
Between the essence  
And the descent  
Falls the Shadow
> 
> For Thine is the Kingdom
> 
> For Thine is  
Life is  
For Thine is the
> 
> This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends  
This is the way the world ends  
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

The abortive lines referencing the Lord’s Prayer indicate a struggle against a father—The Father—and, dispersed as they are among the lines about a Shadow falling between concepts that should never otherwise be separated, themselves become the Shadow. The Shadow is a higher concept, a higher being, with the power to tear apart even logically and naturally inseparable things. In the context of Alex and Roswell, Jesse Manes is, in many ways a literal Shadow obstructing connectedness and growth. However, there is another version of the Shadow which his worldview has caused to transfer to his son. Critic J. Hillis Miller identifies the Shadow as “the paralysis which seizes men who live in a completely subjective world,” and states, “Mind had seemed the medium which binds all things together in the unity of an organic culture. Now [the mind] is revealed to be the Shadow which isolates things from one another, reduces them to abstraction, and makes movement, feeling, and creativity impossible.” Alex’s “subjective reality” is not a traditional one, but rather the result of two worldviews fighting for supremacy within him and forcing him to a standstill—his own, and the one his father has imposed upon him his entire life. A subjective reality forms when he is incapable of making decisions based upon one worldview without the other intruding; there is no objective truth, no objective way of leading his life. An objective sense of purpose is, of course, something that all people strive for regardless of their circumstances, but it is the specific destabilizing outside force which in “The Hollow Men” is referred to as the “Shadow” that makes Alex’s experience resonate with the text of the poem. By the end of the poem, the speaker cannot so much as complete a sentence. The Shadow comes between, among other things, the thought and the speech. In the same way, Alex’s own “Shadow,” being both the imprinted trauma and continuing expectation as well as his father’s physical presence, comes between who he is and who he wants to be; who he can be and what face he shows to the world.

The speaker and Alex end the poem in the same way as they began. Trapped in a role that is part tool, part puppet, part propaganda, caught between wishing for hope or salvation and wishing he could even wish for as much as that. He has companions but feels no companionship; he stands on the banks of a river but has no boat with which to cross, nor any money to pay the ferryman. And all the while he is watched by these eyes which represent a state of being or an ideal which he can never achieve, but just as he scorns those eyes and wishes they would turn away, they do, and he is left sightless and silent.

This is not a happy poem. Nor do I believe that analyzing it in this way will reveal any more hopeful, happier meaning for Eliot’s hollow men or for Alex Manes. The existence of the hollow men is a bleak one, and at the very beginning of Roswell, New Mexico—the inciting events that build upon each other until Alex references the poem—Alex is in a fairly bleak place himself. However. I, unlike Eliot, do not believe in unhappy endings, so I didn’t want to close out this section just with a whimper. So while this essay concerns itself primarily with bleakness, I still want to remind everyone that “the world ends with a whimper” in episode nine of thirteen (and yet to come). Alex has already punched through the end of the world and is in the process of pulling himself through that hole and out the other side, retaking agency, rediscovering himself, relearning what he wants and how he is going to achieve those desires. The hollow men may have only empty hopes, but Alex’s hope is very real, and his character’s journey, as is the case with all characters in Roswell’s first season, has only just begun.

Part six of this essay will reexamine Alex’s character, his relationship to “The Hollow Men” at various points in his life, and his decision to quote the poem in context from a Watsonian perspective.

**Part VI: Alien nation**

In order to examine the place of “The Hollow Men” in Alex’s life, we should start at the earliest point for which we have any context for his character. In episode 1x05, Alex references himself as a child before high school and says his father knew he was gay before he did. This mention is brief and barely expanded, but it does provide a point of reference for Alex as a child and the alienation he experienced beginning from such a young age. The audience is given much more context for his character as a teenager on the cusp of becoming a young man, in his last year of high school and about to enter adulthood. It is likely in high school that Alex would have encountered the works of T.S. Eliot—that’s when I did, personally, through both class assignments and a deeply teenage draw towards angsty modernist poets. Eliot’s work is—and I’m drawing on the evidence of my eyes, here, rather than the scholarly—moody and depressing and vague, full of literary references and snippets of myriad different languages, and all those things are intensely appealing to the emo teen.

There are aspects of Eliot’s work that would have come through for Alex as a representation of his personal experience. Eliot himself was not a soldier; he remained at Oxford through the duration of the first World War, and nor did he involve himself in World War II. However, “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” are poems about war all the same, written in the post-war landscape of 1920’s London and among all the accompanying—appropriately dichotomous—depression and euphoria of victory, survival, guilt, and the Treaty of Versailles. The tension between Eliot’s civilian status and the unavoidable nature of writing about war creates a compellingly fitting—or compellingly antithetical—profile of an author in the life of Alex Manes, who was a soldier long before he officially became an airman. As he states, “My father was my war.”. Unlike war poets both canonized and lost to history, Eliot could not write about the realities of the battlefield. However, the emotions felt, and communicated in “The Hollow Men,” are still intensely resonant with the feelings of soldiers. The struggle with hope and loss of hope, the religious imagery, the over-hanging, vague menace of the Shadow, all call to difficulties of returning soldiers and the transition back into a “normal” life, which may never be “normal” again. Therefore, while Eliot’s body of work in general appeals to a person with Alex’s personality, his taste in fashion and music, and in his stage of life at eighteen, “The Hollow Men” as a specific instance of Eliot’s work would have called to Alex more personally.

The religious themes contained in “The Hollow Men” would have had a particular resonance for Alex as a gay young man trapped in a restrictive, though not outright religiously based, household. Again, I draw from personal experience. Because of the opinion of queerness held by conservative religion, which is at _best _a sort of compassionate condemnation, young queer people often have an instinct toward rebellion and reclamation of the cultural narratives of salvation and damnation. The hollow men in the poem are a group of people condemned to an eternal purgatory, outside of paradise, outside of hell, and this denial of the spiritual right to judgment hits on some aspects of that rebellious feeling. The religious imagery in “The Hollow Men” is indicative of Eliot’s despair at the failings of love, which he attempts to ameliorate with a turn towards God and Christianity, but this is not a path that holds any sort of sanctuary for Alex, even as he struggles with heartbreak and despair. While I can’t say with certainty how Alex feels about religion, I can say that religious alienation is both another type of alienation keenly felt by many queer youth as well as a key feature in understanding “The Hollow Men.”

This understanding of the poem’s religious themes as well as aspects of the poem I earlier established regarding Alex’s relationship with his father provide understanding as to how Alex might have experienced the poem as a young man. I can imagine a scenario in which he was exposed to Eliot’s writing through school and how that writing might have stuck with him through the ensuing decade. Time passed, he grew up, but the feeling of alienation only grew more severe as he compartmentalized his personal identity and his identity as an airman—and lived more completely in the latter. Until, that is, the audience first meets him in the pilot episode of _Roswell, New Mexico. _

We first meet Alex as an airman, not as a civilian, but the connection he has with Michael is immediately established. It first comes off as antagonistic, but over the course of the episode it unspools itself until the final romantic confrontation at the very end of the episode. Though the viewer is unsure how adversarial Alex may be at this point, no doubt remains that he is a person leading an intensely complicated life. In subsequent episodes, we see Alex shed the uniform more and more, even as he struggles to overthrow his father’s influence and does not always succeed. Finally, in episode 1x08, he learns that Isobel, Max, and, most importantly, Michael are in fact aliens; and not only that, but Michael has been identified as a high-level threat. Though this information is filtered through the lens of his father’s manipulation, and he rightly rejects that worldview, Alex is still left with a choice to make. Does he follow his heart, which tells him that his father must be wrong and that the man he loves couldn’t possibly be the evil Project Shepherd says he is, or does he follow his head, which tells him that he needs to have all the information before he can make any sort of decision, and that he has to do so _alone, _not trusting anyone else, not simply going up to Michael and asking?

This is the choice Alex struggles to make in the days and weeks leading up to the confrontation with Michael in the Wild Pony at the beginning of episode 1x09. It is a choice with an explicit emotional link to his identity as an airman, as shown in the later conversation between Alex and Kyle:

Alex: “I just…I can’t go in blind.”

Kyle: “I’m talking about a conversation, Manes. Not a war.”

But even when he’s faced with Michael demanding the answer to a question he doesn’t even know Alex is asking, Alex hasn’t yet decided. That decision comes at the end of the episode, when he declares “I’m tired of walking away” and asks Michael to tell him _everything. _During that moment in the Wild Pony, Alex is still caught, one could say, between the idea and the reality, the motion and the act, the emotion and the response. And he doesn’t say “we’re done;” he doesn’t say “not now;” he doesn’t say “let’s talk.” He quotes “The Hollow Men.”

**Part VII: Conclusion**

By invoking “The Hollow Men,” Alex calls upon this entire body of bleak imagery, of hopelessness, and of futility. Even what potential for salvation exists within the poem is “the hope only / of empty men.” “Sometimes the world ends with a whimper” is a gut punch of a line to begin with, but the statement he makes is even more deliberate and definite than it first appears. First, it’s a tacit admission that this thing between himself and Michael that he’s ending has or does constitute a “world” of its own. Second, if Alex identifies with the speaker of the poem, it’s an admission that not only does the world end with a whimper, but that it does so because of failings within himself, the same failings of the hollow men. It’s an apology as much as it is a rejection.

Alex’s journey, as previously stated, does not end when he references the end of the world itself. His character, despite the massive strides taken throughout season one, has not completed its arc. He has not struggled for the last time against the influence of his father or the consequences of a lifetime of trauma. There will always be a part of him that identifies with the scarecrow and the effigy. With this explication of “The Hollow Men,” I strive to identify the imagery and themes within the poem that are illustrative of Alex’s character, some of his internal struggles, and his choice to reference the poem at such a subtly key moment. Episode 1x09, both the confrontation in the Wild Pony and the reconnection in the junkyard, is a pivotal moment for both Alex’s character and his relationship with Michael. Understanding the potential weight behind his choice of words aids understanding of him in totality, where he is coming from, and where he may go from here.

* * *

References

Eliot, T.S. “The Hollow Men.” _Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, _ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 9th ed., 2013, pp. 2728.

Howard, Jeffrey G. “T.S. Eliot’s THE HOLLOW MEN_.” The Explicator_, vol. 70, no. 1, 2012, pp. 8-12, [https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2012.656736.](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1080%2F00144940.2012.656736.&t=YTNhYzg3M2JjMTVhMmUwZDg2NWNiYzg2NThjZDBkMjcxZTNlZjljMSxCaEF2UzNSMA%3D%3D&b=t%3A4QHEIigK2e3b8omjC4ZUDg&p=https%3A%2F%2Fcosmicsolipsism.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187867570393%2Fnot-as-lost-violent-souls-alex-manes-and-ts&m=1) Accessed 2 Sept. 2019.

“Poets of Reality; Six Twentieth-Century Writers.” Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1965.

Smith, Grover. _T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. _Chicago: U of Chicago, 1956. Print.

“Watsonian vs. Doylist.” _TvTropes.org. _Accessed 27 Aug. 2019.

Worthen, John. _T.S. Eliot : A Short Biography_. London: Haus Pub., 2011. Print.

* * *

[1] The critical framework of Watsonian and Doylist readings of a text references Sherlock Holmes, of course, with the first term referring to the world of the story as seen by Watson, and the second term referring to the world of the story as seen by Conan Doyle. The first term relies upon in-universe perspectives and reasoning for the behavior of characters, settings, and events. The second term contains the understanding that the text is created from the ground up by an author or authors, inextricable from the practical reality of creation, i.e. time constraints, budgetary constraints, personal biases, human error, and in the case of movies and television, actor interpretation. The technical terms for this critical framework are intradiegetic and extradiegetic but those terms like, suck, and the Sherlockian ones are, in my opinion, easier to understand.

[2] Howard, Jeffrey G. “T.S. Eliot’s THE HOLLOW MEN_.” The Explicator_, vol. 70, no. 1, 2012, pp. 8-12, [https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2012.656736.](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1080%2F00144940.2012.656736.&t=YTNhYzg3M2JjMTVhMmUwZDg2NWNiYzg2NThjZDBkMjcxZTNlZjljMSxCaEF2UzNSMA%3D%3D&b=t%3A4QHEIigK2e3b8omjC4ZUDg&p=https%3A%2F%2Fcosmicsolipsism.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187867570393%2Fnot-as-lost-violent-souls-alex-manes-and-ts&m=1) Accessed 2 Sept. 2019.

[3] Howard goes into some detail about this line (line 11 of Shelley’s poem); he points out the capitalization of the word “Mighty,” how that grammatical convention is usually reserved for “proper nouns and deities,” and how it “solidifies just such a correlation” between “Ozymandias” and the “feigned divinity of the hollow men.”

[4] Continuing the Ozymandias reference; worshipping a ruin of something that used to be grand but was always fallible. I really suggest anyone who wants to read a Romantic poet’s 14-line dunk on Jesse Manes go give Ozymandias a look.

[5] According to the Norton anthology’s footnotes as well as scholarship on some of Eliot’s other work, as well as Dante’s, which is a stated inspiration for both “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men,” the tumid river refers to the river Acheron, which is both a real river in Greece and a fixture of Greek mythology—the river which one must cross to reach the underworld, the river from which the underworld’s other rivers all spring forth.

[6] Same Grover Smith I referenced earlier. He’s a serious scholar! But serious literary scholars are also often very, very silly. And literary scholars and anthropologists share the quirk of educated guessing that demands that, when in doubt, every symbol must be either a deity or a penis.

[7] The only story I’m aware about concerning mulberry bushes is the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, a sort of proto-Romeo and Juliet story in which two families hated each other, but their children fell in love by whispering through a crack in the wall between them. The myth/drama ends with a double suicide. It is the blood of the lovers that gives mulberries their color to this day. Thanks, the Greeks, for yet another heartwarming tale about nature, and one that is not particularly, uh, yonic. I think the mulberry bush children’s song might possibly be about washerwomen, hence the idea that it is feminine, but I would hardly consider the prickly pear a masculine version of that. In short: Grover. Man. _What._


End file.
